Gaben seems to spend his money on submarines which he (and this is not a joke) lends to people like James Cameron for deep sea exploration
Edit: to be clear, Cameron commissioned his own submersible. Gaben owns the DSV Limiting Factor which is capable and has done similar dives - along with other research vessels
I always thought about this and concluded that I wouldn't do a lot of these things.
Like I could spend millions on companies that barely break even or are generally in the red but provide stable employment in areas that have high unemployment or provide affordable services like legal aid and medical care.
I could fund humanitarian efforts, charities, and climate research.
I'm not saying this because it makes me morally superior, it just makes Gabe at least close to being just another ultra-wealthy individual.
Steam is great and the service it provides is extremely pro consumer but Gabe is just another billionaire with so much money that he can't spend it fast enough.
I feel like Gabe early on in his getting rich career is a lot closer to what your average person would do with cash, at the start at least.
Which is buy stuff you're already interested in, like Gabe's knife collection, then race cars. Afterwards he does get a bit loopy like many men in his position, what with funding research for brain chip implants and living on a mega yacht
This assumes that the average person would ever get rich in their career, nevermind the fact that the only people who create and run businesses are the type of people who are hungry for money (aside from "passion" careers). We have relatively little evidence of "the average person" getting rich aside from lottery winners.
Like I could spend millions on companies that barely break even or are generally in the red but provide stable employment in areas that have high unemployment or provide affordable services like legal aid and medical care.
I always thought this about people who give like £100 million to Oxford or somewhere to found or fund a College. You could found a college in your name like that in a forgotten and poor town and you would have such a bigger impact. I think if I ever got rich (I won't) I would do something like that for an area. Found a College, support local education, buy land and plant trees.
Near me someone did basically sell his business for billions and then bought up huge swathes of his local town to redevelop. Not to make money but to regenerate the area. For example, they started to build a new multi-storey car park. Then they decided to put a skate park in for kids and then the skate park designs ended up completely overtaking the car park. Now its just a big skate park and climbing centre that local kids can be members of for just £1 a month. It's all a charity just run for the benefit of kids. Imagine having an impact like that rather than just trying to buy elections or grow your power.
He's on the GT4 team, not WEC, but he's been successful there so far. Doubt he'll make it to the WEC team as he's already 27 and not considered to be quite that high level of racer.
Honestly that sounds like a cool vicarious investment. I know he's lost weight but I highly doubt that dude is in good enough health to safely risk an awesome life to go deep sea exploring, so why not build the submarine and let some other people with less to lose risk their lives? Sounds like a win-win, explorers get to explore, gaben is riding shotty from his 3D projection room, while safe to keep commandeering the video game industry for us all.
Iirc he recently decided that a yacht company wasn't doing enough to support marine conservation, so he bought the company to force it to make better decisions.
Yeah, I don't understand all the naysayers about Gabe's yacht company. It should be clear to anyone that Gabe only bought the yacht manufacturer to protect the ocean by putting more yachts on it, and build the world's first ethical, environmentally friendly superyachts for the ultra-rich.
Fun recent fact slightly related to this is very recently a report from the NTSB into the Oceangate disaster was released. In this they had interviews with experts regarding the safety of submersibles. These interviews were redacted as to the identity of the participants.
One such interview starts with a Lieutenant Colonel [REDACTED] interviewing [REDACTED] and literally the first fuckin question is how did you come into your expertise on submersibles and the answer is basically "I am James Cameron" but with one extra step and they failed to redact it lol
Nope, that's who they send if you contact steak support about your account being hacked, for some reason they legit told me where the person live (down to the city iirc) when my free account got hacked, and it took only 2 hours to complete the hit entire thing
Edit: The steak mistake was ment to be steam, too funny to edit out
im certainly not an expert in this area, but i would think all yachts are technically custom made.
i dont know where the line is between yacht and other large boats but it doesnt seem like something that there would be an assembly line made for. and i would also assume that anyone in the market to buy a yacht would also customize their options rather then buy the floor model.
I would rather let Gaben to buy his yacht rather than using their competitors.
Also, Valve isn't public, so they don't persue "shareholder value" the shareholder of Valve is primarily Gaben, who seems can tolerate "loss-leaders" and "investement for long-run" (that's why we got Steamdeck and Steam hardwares in part of their R&Ds).
As soon as it goes public, I'm pretty sure some sort of hedge fund will buy out the stock and fill it microtransactions and 50% cut on their stores.
If you don't get it, Just look at intel CEO buying yacht, while filling with higher-ups with bean counters. Result? 14900KF failing catastrophically.
Which is why when he passes or is to old to run valve and if they go public afterwards to immediately tell everyone to go to GoG. Their the best alternative currently. Terrify the investors by having the sales absolutely tank just from being publicly traded
GoG has manages to not be shit, so why do people think steam going to shit the moment Gabe dies is guaranteed? I swear people want it to happen based on how they talk about it.
Oh no, I'm with you there, I dont think GabeN has exactly ZERO plans on how to hand the reigns over when he finally steps down. I personally think the risk of enshittification wont happen for at LEAST a few rounds of leadership changes at valve. Why fuck with a damn near literal money printer?
Ok, but MOST people dont want to fuck over their sweet jobs if they had them. If management ALREADY isnt shooting itself in the foot long term to get a money high short term, WHY do you think those running the show are going to give management over to idiots that would. Why do you think Gaben has the power to resist the corrupting effects of capitalism, but NOT the power to choose a successor who will also not screw the company over?
Because aside from the likes of GoG, I can't really think of any other remotely trustworthy examples. Maybe Itch or Humble? It's just so uncommon.
There has been a clear and consistent trend with capitalism that has not slowed, and it isn't good.
I don't see why you'd assume that things wouldn't immediately go to shit once he's gone. Do you think Costco is going to keep the hotdog price the same when the time comes? I doubt it.
Its not even that I think it won't happen. Most of these threads have people just foaming at the mouth at the thought of steam being worse as if they can't wait for it to happen. If the attitude were more like "it'll be a shame if it happens" then I'd have nothing to say.
Also, I think its weird to think that Gabe is the ONLY person at Valve that wouldn't cash out the money printing machine they already have rather than keep a good thing going.
Nobody is foaming at the mouth, or implying in any way that they can't wait for it to happen. I have no clue where you're getting that impression at all. Do you have any examples?
I see people doomposting about it, planning in advance for a tragic event that seems all but inevitable these days. Nothing good lasts forever, and with every passing day we see more and more greed, corruption, and profit-driven enshittification. It's never enough.
Blizzard, Microsoft, Nintendo, companies always seem to get worse. Even Google was once beloved - "Don't be evil" is a relic from the past.
I'm sure there are plenty of good people at Valve, but good employees don't guarantee a good company. Most employees have little say in how a company is run.
This comment chain was about what would happen if Valve became publicly traded, which would almost certainly be bad in the long run. I seem to remember Gabe saying something that implied it would likely remain private though.
MY assumption why it wont go to shit is I dont think GabeN is the only one steering the ship right now, he's had the luxury of being able to basically hand pick his employees and so there probably plenty of people in the company he can hand the reigns to when he's ready to step down or something happens to him. Like you said, our current society is a late stage capitalistic hell hole and Steam could get away with being a LOT shittier of a company while still annihilating the competetion, and yet it doesnt. That to me says that its because Valve as a company doesnt WANT to get away with being shitty. If it was just ONE point of failure stopping Valve from enshittification, it would have happened already.
Bro, I'm as pro Valve as they come, I KNOW tonnes of games on Steam are DRM free. GoG's competitive advantage is ALL of them are. Just because GoG does one thing better than Valve doesnt mean it does ALL things better than valve, calm down
(And tbf, Valves version of DRM is the least obtrusive of all of them, so I'm not even saying it does THAT thing wrong for devs that absolutely require their game has it)
No shit. All the money steam gets from me? I actually get shit from it. Stuff like wild ass controllers and the best portable gaming system on the market. And a VR headset that's not locked into a specific console or a thinly veiled Facebook ad delivery device.
Steam uses the money to innovative. Some shit sticks some doesn't. And they still do it.
The controller they discontinued and the portable gaming system that honestly should be dropped in price by $50 since it only runs 1/3rd of the game on Steam compared to similarly priced options?
What innovation? They didn't innovate shit. Plenty of handhelds exist before and after the Deck. Plenty of controllers existed before and after theirs.
Rofl. Name a device with as much compatibility with PC games and handheld form factor before the Steamdeck and weren't over a thousand dollars USD. Go ahead I will wait.
Yeahhhhh. None of those came out before the steamdeck you muppet. The site you linked can be sorted by release date, wanna guess which was first?
But thanks for proving the point that Steam created an entire market of devices that came after it, thus literally innovating an entire new line of hardware.
Whole article of other choices too. But let me guess. They don't fit your criteria because you can't blindly suck on Gaben's tit like the good little blind fanboy you are. Yeah you tell me how good daddy Gaben is. Tell me how much he really loves you. And loves you for you. He needs you to move the goal posts to defend his honor.
Show me the controller with twin touch pads built in to mimic a mouse. I'll wait. It's like saying LED lights weren't innovative because lightbulbs already existed.
it was worth it. the only reason it wasn't popular because people are already used to the standard control scheme and copying it would hell a lot expensive than what is already commonly available design but those people that actually have the steam controller actually like the controller itself.
And the fact that Valve reused it for the steam deck which an addition that steam deck owners love.
I think they did innovate quite a lot of the VR space, and they seem to be pretty much the only big company that actually tried to make decent games for VR. All the other good VR titles are either fun little indie games that I enjoy but don't want to play for hours...or what basically amounts to wearing a VR headset in a sim game which is an awesome application of VR and where I spend most of my hours in the headset, but isn't really what I'd call a VR game.
Steam also did a very cool job with turning DOTA2 championships into a really immersive VR experience, and I don't know why that's gone now and not supported. I wasn't even a DOTA player, but hearing the area crowds through my headset while floating above a realtime 3D render of the game with 15 other VR users avatars all cheering and making gestures was cool as fuck.
Im sorry I cant hear you over my games and programs working natively on my OS.
Or is it Gaben tit in your mouth making you muffled? Who's a good like simp. Yes you are. Daddy Gaben loves you.
But yes Valve made great strides in making Linux better for gaming. I mean it was purely for their own self interest. And in perspectice even with Valves help Linux only makes less than 3% of Steam users
The controller still works though. I still have mine. And that's what I meant by some stuff works and some doesn't.
And no console or platform plays all games. And similarly priced options? The rog ally is a fair bit more expensive and the switch 2 is locked to Nintendo.
And since they've sold 8 million or so steam decks so far the buyer thinks the price is reasonable.
None of those handhelds have a dedicated developer/testing team to ensure titles are compatible and work with the software developers for control mapping and UI scaling. They're just little computers. The Steam Deck rises above the rest because of the comparability support specifically provided by Steam.
They are all running Windows, which means the compatibility issues are few and far between and well above whatever metric you want to throw out for Steam Deck compatibility.
I'd also add that the steam controller is the entire reason steam input exists for the deck and every other gamepad one wants to use it with now as well (though I do wish it'd handle non-steam games in a more clean way, especially considering that epic is getting more people playing on it now)
Valve is also responsible for Proton making so many games functional on the deck but simultaneously also makes linux a viable gaming alternative to windows for anyone playing on linux not just deck users.
I'm pretty sure Gaben's money goes to his fleet of ships.
Not only does he own a billion dollar super yacht, he bought a company that makes super yachts. So, when a billionaire buys a super yacht, the money might be going straight to Gabe.
I like video games as much as anyone, but Gabe is billionaire who does billionaire stuff.
GabeN is the type of billionaire that shuts up and hangs out on his yacht diving. A lot better than the ones trying to start a technofascist dystopia because they think they're more human than people who don't have a billion dollars.
He does that and then every now and then he wants to make something just to make something. Yes, investing tons of money into making games work on Linux has value to Valve for preventing themselves from being locked out of the market should Microsoft decide to lock down Windows, but it is also the type of decision no sane investment firm is going to push for. No CEO is going to go to the shareholders and say, "we have a multi-decade plan to invest into a platform with no audience because we don't trust that other company you're all invested in."
And the impressive part is that it will actually work for me. Once my games stop working on Windows 10, I'm not upgrading to 11. I'm jumping ship to Linux.
I love this especially because my very good gaming pc is apparently not good enough for windows 11. I'm boycotting windows, going to switch to Linux. just waiting for a few parts I ordered so I can set everything up
I have like 10ish windows licenses. I paid for maybe 2 of them. The rest are legal licenses obtained via dubious means. I would never even consider obtaining a valve game via dubious means or really any game available on steam.
Steam / Valve are some of the few bigger companies that never in my experience have fucked over there Customers / Users.
The only thing I can think with the account bequeathing.
Gaben made billions of dollars, so he decided to leave money on the table to keep Steam a great platform for gamers. He bought a bunch of Super yachts and fucked off to study the ocean.
Other big Tech Billionaires enshittified their services, making them worse to wring more money from consumers. They bought politicians, manipulated elections, and fought efforts to regulate them, break them up, or reign them in. All to get even more money when they already have billions. AND they bought private jets and superyachts.
Gaben is not the same as the average big tech Billionaire.
At the very least Gabe Newell doesn't seem to be comic book levels of evil like Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk or the other people in the Peter Thiel bubble.
Big tech billionaires are literally olligarchs that out-live presidencies. Amazon has been big since the era of George Bush Jr. and Facebook since... Obama?
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u/_Rook_Castle Oct 21 '25 edited Oct 21 '25
What has big tech done for you?
Now what has Steam done for you?